Wailers blitz Blue Skies

Jeff Green | Aug 07, 2014

They arrived near dusk in a van and a car, with cartloads of equipment that needed to be navigated down the hill, past a couple of thousand people who were milling about playing frizbee, watching the music or looking for their children as night was coming in.
“You better rock this place after making us drag all this stuff down there,” we told them.
“Oh, we will,” said Lindsay Beaver, the band's drummer and driving force, “not to worry.”
An hour and a half later, after a highly entertaining performance by Coco Love Alcorn and Ian Sherwood, the crowd was ready to jump and jive.
Then the curtain rose on five musicians lined up at the front of the stage, the drum kit at the centre of stage, and Lindsay Beaver glaring out at the audience like a boxer ready to burst out from the corner.
“One, two, three, four,” she yelled and then hit the snare and bass drums as the other four players (sax, double bass, keyboards and guitar) all launched into the first number.
From then on it was a blur. The Wailers play no-holds-barred original blues/rock/R&B tunes that sound at first like they could be 50 years old. There is much of the manic Jerry-Lee Lewis vibe in what they do, but they are no throwback.
The genre they play was pretty much a macho domain in its early day, with women more often than not singing back up, or sometimes lead vocals. The women in Wailers - Beaver and guitarist Emily Burgess - are the songwriters and their drum and guitar work drives the music; no window-dressing there.
However that does not mean that the men in the band take a back seat. Saxophonist Jon Wong struts his stuff with the very best of them, as do bassist Mike Archer and Jesse Whitely, the newest member of the band, on keyboards.
Not to get wrapped up in gender politics - the band is not particularly bothered by them, but even in 2014 it is refreshing to see those rock and roll stereotypes stood on their ear.
The Wailers get hired to play blues festivals around the world, but it is hard to imagine a better kind of setting for them than in front of a crowd that wants to dance and shout. They played fast and strong; it was an engaging performance from start to finish. And they seemed to enjoy themselves doing it. I hope someone helped them get their gear back up the hill afterwards.
Julia Phillips is the artistic director of the Blue Skies Festival. In her third year on the job she brought a number of new faces to the little back-field on Clarendon Road.
Last year, which was the festival’s 40th year, featured some nostalgic elements and the return of some of the bands from earlier eras of the festival. This year was about looking forward. The only returning acts were Jaron Freeman Fox and the Opposite of Everything, who are in their early 20s, and the Rhythm Haints, a band of teenagers from Kingston who were rained out last year. Aside from that, there was a lot of variety in the mix of music: the Dardanelles (Newfoundland), Genitocurm (Quebec), manic Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers (Nova Scotia), Gregory Hoskins (Guelph), and the wonderful Sheesham and Lotus and Son (Wolfe Islands/Gatineau). It is a delicate mix between styles that is required by a festival that attracts a seamless mix of young families, teenagers and 20 and 30 somethings, along with the greying and balding set who have been navigating the narrow Clarendon Road since the ’70s and ’80s.
The Blue Skies Festival now has a website, and among the useful information on the site, the one controversial element is the line-up of musicians, complete with links to band sites. Many festival-goers are resistant to the idea of knowing what they will hear before they go to the festival and they now have to avoid the temptation to click on the links to the bands' web and You-tube sites. They want the artistic director to surprise them.
Julia Phillips delivered many pleasant surprises this year, and a revelation, the 24th Street Wailers.